1 00:00:09,960 --> 00:00:13,860 I don't mind when they to the door, but I could tell that he was exhausted. 2 00:00:13,860 --> 00:00:20,490 As usual, he was sitting behind a worn out would invest in a small pharmacy in the fringes of old Cairo, 3 00:00:20,490 --> 00:00:26,130 the sprawling lower income neighbourhood that covers large parts of the southern perimeters. 4 00:00:26,130 --> 00:00:30,690 Dressed in a woollen jumper turtleneck shirt to protect against a winter wind, 5 00:00:30,690 --> 00:00:36,540 it was finalising an order of supplies over the phone while simultaneously directing his assistant 6 00:00:36,540 --> 00:00:41,910 to provide packs of pills and syrups on the glass shelves covering the walls around them. 7 00:00:41,910 --> 00:00:48,480 The steady stream of visitors was calling for his attention by not these painkillers Tramadol with hair gel, 8 00:00:48,480 --> 00:00:53,670 making their blood pressure and asking to withdraw all sorts of medical advice. 9 00:00:53,670 --> 00:01:02,550 In his early 30s, with two wives and three kids in two separate homes to support, Hamada was familiar with a routine for the last five years. 10 00:01:02,550 --> 00:01:07,260 Get worked five, six, seven long days per week in the pharmacy. 11 00:01:07,260 --> 00:01:12,420 No holiday throughout this period had amounted to more than four or five days. 12 00:01:12,420 --> 00:01:16,530 After a few minutes, the customer cared for the moment that we got a chance to talk. 13 00:01:16,530 --> 00:01:22,800 Hamada invited me to sit down on a chair next to him, and he asked his assistant to make us tea. 14 00:01:22,800 --> 00:01:32,700 In the previous month, Hamouda had developed an invaluable interlocutor and a good friend, an obsessive Zmolek supporter for more than twenty years. 15 00:01:32,700 --> 00:01:36,330 It was immensely knowledgeable about the sport's past and present. 16 00:01:36,330 --> 00:01:42,510 Whenever I had come to see him in the pharmacy, as well as when we had attended matches together at Cairo Stadium, 17 00:01:42,510 --> 00:01:50,460 he had taken pains to provide me with all the details and anecdotes I needed to know this afternoon in early February 2012. 18 00:01:50,460 --> 00:01:55,610 However, both of us found it difficult to formulate thoughts and feeling. 19 00:01:55,610 --> 00:02:01,720 Since our last meeting about a week earlier, the stadium massacre in Port Said had taken place. 20 00:02:01,720 --> 00:02:11,530 The killing of 72 young football fans that unleashed clashes between protesters and security forces that were bringing central Cairo to full. 21 00:02:11,530 --> 00:02:19,300 Being is an account of a different generation and of Hamouda had no personal relation to anyone who had been President Ford. 22 00:02:19,300 --> 00:02:21,820 Nonetheless, as a devoted football supporter, 23 00:02:21,820 --> 00:02:29,800 the tragedy affected him profoundly in face of the unfathomable that had befallen with rancour and silence, 24 00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:34,610 Hamouda fiddle with a piece of paper, his gaze removed and tired. 25 00:02:34,610 --> 00:02:39,860 Well, one, two words, I came up with a suggestion perhaps we could he could finish early so we could watch the 26 00:02:39,860 --> 00:02:46,010 semi-final in Africa Cup of Nations between Ghana and Zambia and a nearby coffee shop. 27 00:02:46,010 --> 00:02:52,910 Hamada's Raksha was the first one of confusion. But then he smiled at me, almost embarrassed and said, this is a quote. 28 00:02:52,910 --> 00:03:00,410 I don't know, Carl, but honestly, until you said it, I didn't know that the semi-final was today and I didn't know who was playing. 29 00:03:00,410 --> 00:03:05,960 It's strange, isn't it? Remember when you asked me about tournaments in the 1990s and 2000s? 30 00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:14,090 I knew all the games that all the players, everything did. And I always watched every game and I remembered so many details about each tournament. 31 00:03:14,090 --> 00:03:19,310 I'm really good at that. And now I don't even know who is playing in the semi-final. 32 00:03:19,310 --> 00:03:23,420 It doesn't matter to me. I kind of think about football any longer. I'm sorry. 33 00:03:23,420 --> 00:03:30,890 It just doesn't feel right. Actually, the only one who discusses football with me these days is you. 34 00:03:30,890 --> 00:03:38,270 Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk, the Oxford podcast on new books about Middle East. 35 00:03:38,270 --> 00:03:46,970 These are books that are written sometimes by members of our community or else by books that we're talking about in our community at Oxford. 36 00:03:46,970 --> 00:03:55,850 My name is Walter Armbrust. I teach part of the Middle East in the Middle East Studies Programme at the University of Oxford, Pakistan. 37 00:03:55,850 --> 00:04:00,950 I was speaker for this podcast is Karl Bromell. 38 00:04:00,950 --> 00:04:06,650 Karl did his PhD in anthropology at the school, Oriental and African Studies. 39 00:04:06,650 --> 00:04:14,080 I know him from having been his external examiner. He finished in twenty fifteen years our 2015. 40 00:04:14,080 --> 00:04:23,500 Fifteen, you know, afterwards, she had a post-doctoral fellowship for a year at the from modern Orient and Berlin, followed by research, 41 00:04:23,500 --> 00:04:27,550 a position in a European Research Council funded project at the University of 42 00:04:27,550 --> 00:04:33,130 Helsinki called Cross Locations Rethinking Relative Locations in the Mediterranean. 43 00:04:33,130 --> 00:04:41,500 And the point of project, as I understand it, is to understand changes in relations between people and locations in the Mediterranean region. 44 00:04:41,500 --> 00:04:50,950 Khalil's dissertation was an ethnography of Egyptian football, a topic that has been crying out for attention for about 50 years. 45 00:04:50,950 --> 00:05:00,820 He happens to have been researching the book during the revolution that began in 2011, but through. 46 00:05:00,820 --> 00:05:07,790 Through, through because of that, a great deal. 47 00:05:07,790 --> 00:05:16,310 Had to be said about the role of the football ultras in the revolution, but Carl's research goes much further than revolutionary politics. 48 00:05:16,310 --> 00:05:22,700 And a book based on the station is now out, published by the University of Texas Press. 49 00:05:22,700 --> 00:05:31,370 And the title is Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics. 50 00:05:31,370 --> 00:05:35,030 Karl, welcome to the Middle East centre community, at least virtually speaking. 51 00:05:35,030 --> 00:05:42,830 One day, we hope to have you actually in our midst talking about your research face to face. 52 00:05:42,830 --> 00:05:50,870 So let me ask you first about writing the book. Tell us something about how the writing of your book proceeded. 53 00:05:50,870 --> 00:05:58,130 What made you want to write about football? It's almost a cliché to say that everyone in Egypt has to be either in Fallujah as an 54 00:05:58,130 --> 00:06:03,320 going a follower of one of the two most famous professional football clubs in Egypt. 55 00:06:03,320 --> 00:06:13,340 Was that truism about somehow a starting point for the ethnography, or did you see it ultimately as an impediment to the hierarchy? 56 00:06:13,340 --> 00:06:17,630 How did you go about formulating your research interests and getting into your field? 57 00:06:17,630 --> 00:06:23,210 So thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. 58 00:06:23,210 --> 00:06:27,980 So I think it was a little bit of a starting point as many others. 59 00:06:27,980 --> 00:06:33,800 I came to Egypt first to to study Arabic back in 2007 and 2008 and always been a 60 00:06:33,800 --> 00:06:37,790 big football fan and always been watching football wherever I've been travelling. 61 00:06:37,790 --> 00:06:43,220 But it was something with football in Egypt that sort of caught my attention even more than in many other places. 62 00:06:43,220 --> 00:06:48,980 And it was the fact that football seemed to be absolutely everywhere in the street and always in urban space. 63 00:06:48,980 --> 00:06:53,120 So in all these cafes where people watching the game all over the media, 64 00:06:53,120 --> 00:07:00,050 it was almost difficult to have any type of conversation with people without without touching on the topic. 65 00:07:00,050 --> 00:07:03,800 And then they'll obviously this thing is a marketing thing, these two big clubs. 66 00:07:03,800 --> 00:07:14,330 Right. So when I a couple of years later wanted to set up a research project for pièce. 67 00:07:14,330 --> 00:07:21,800 This was something I wanted to do something about trying to sort of interrogate how how this sort of world of football 68 00:07:21,800 --> 00:07:30,320 that seemed to be everywhere was was creating a baseline for creating some sort of everyday masculinity in Cairo. 69 00:07:30,320 --> 00:07:40,400 Now, what happened was I started my PhD in late 2010, and just a few months later, of course, the revolution happened in January 2011. 70 00:07:40,400 --> 00:07:44,810 So and after that, the field sort of transformed beyond recognition. 71 00:07:44,810 --> 00:07:49,040 So instead of studying this when I came to Cairo for my actual fieldwork, 72 00:07:49,040 --> 00:07:57,690 is the main fieldwork for this book was happened between August 2011 and March 2013. 73 00:07:57,690 --> 00:08:05,520 Football was not at all the sort of everyday background noise that I sort of imagine it to be or thought it was when I did my Arabic studies, 74 00:08:05,520 --> 00:08:12,150 but it was rather this extremely politicised thing that was at the same time everywhere it was in the middle of the political transformation, 75 00:08:12,150 --> 00:08:15,720 but also disappearing because people said it, oh, we used to like football in the past, 76 00:08:15,720 --> 00:08:19,140 but nowadays we don't really care that much about the game anymore. 77 00:08:19,140 --> 00:08:24,720 So instead of studying this thing, that was just an everyday phenomena, sort of just started this thing that was changing all the time. 78 00:08:24,720 --> 00:08:34,200 So the book is basically this story about a hugely important popular culture phenomena, football in Egypt that used to be extremely big, 79 00:08:34,200 --> 00:08:40,500 but then was sort of transforming and disappearing over time in tandem with the revolution transition. 80 00:08:40,500 --> 00:08:48,990 So it's in the sense that it's sort of a rise and fall story of football and how it's been taking all these political effects. 81 00:08:48,990 --> 00:08:59,340 Your dissertation, you had quite a bit to say about the decade leading up to the revolution, and I'm assuming that probably not the names in the book. 82 00:08:59,340 --> 00:09:05,180 What was important about football in the decade leading up to the revolution? 83 00:09:05,180 --> 00:09:14,480 So this is this is sort of the starting point for the book, and it's the first two chapters which talk about football in the late Mubarak era. 84 00:09:14,480 --> 00:09:25,020 And I really start my narrative in 1990 when Egypt reached the World Cup in Italy, the first World Cup since 1934, as it was quite a big event. 85 00:09:25,020 --> 00:09:35,120 But the main focus is on the last five years before the revolution from 2006 until 2012 11, when Egypt was extremely successful. 86 00:09:35,120 --> 00:09:41,540 And this is the sort of main the most obvious thing that they won three consecutive Africa Cup of nations, 87 00:09:41,540 --> 00:09:50,480 the national team, and actually was also very successful in Africa. So what I'm trying to argue here is that there was this enormous football high, 88 00:09:50,480 --> 00:09:54,890 unprecedented football hype in Egypt during this period and building up through the 89 00:09:54,890 --> 00:10:02,300 nineties in 2000 and being really sort of climaxing in the last year before 2011. 90 00:10:02,300 --> 00:10:10,670 And I'm trying to to to delineate why that happened and the different sort of components that came together in this big hype. 91 00:10:10,670 --> 00:10:17,990 And it was, on the one hand, new funding for football teams, semi-public football teams like state institutions owning these teams, 92 00:10:17,990 --> 00:10:24,710 like the military, the police, oil companies, owning football teams and channelling money into the game. 93 00:10:24,710 --> 00:10:34,310 There was a big, big rise of satellite television which picked up Egyptian football and domestic football in particular, very, very strongly. 94 00:10:34,310 --> 00:10:41,780 At one point in time, just before 2011, the there was almost 10 different channels in Egypt, only showing football. 95 00:10:41,780 --> 00:10:49,640 So football only satellite television channels and football was also extremely present in popular culture, 96 00:10:49,640 --> 00:10:54,230 in pop songs and in the movies in this period. 97 00:10:54,230 --> 00:10:59,570 And then, of course, you had all these great results with the Gyptian teams were so successful. 98 00:10:59,570 --> 00:11:03,050 And my argument in this, especially in the first chapter of the book, 99 00:11:03,050 --> 00:11:09,290 is that these things came together in this this big what I call a football bubble that sort of 100 00:11:09,290 --> 00:11:16,340 encapsulated a nation and made football a very central feature of of the national formation at the time. 101 00:11:16,340 --> 00:11:20,810 And it sort of delineated a way of being a normal Egyptian man, basically. 102 00:11:20,810 --> 00:11:27,890 So if you were a normal Egyptian guy, man at the time, you had to sort of be a football fan and you had to like football, 103 00:11:27,890 --> 00:11:34,820 you had to be feel strongly for football is what is an emotional high ground the game and. 104 00:11:34,820 --> 00:11:37,970 And what was to cut a long story short? 105 00:11:37,970 --> 00:11:47,120 One of the most important things about this was also that the Mubarak family embodied this normal guy who was not necessarily very intellectual, 106 00:11:47,120 --> 00:11:54,380 not not particularly Muslim, but not to Muslim in the Muslim Brotherhood sort of sense. 107 00:11:54,380 --> 00:12:02,510 So this normal football person, which was what was embodied by the Mubarak family, by Hosni Mubarak, but also by his two sons, Gamal, 108 00:12:02,510 --> 00:12:10,670 and this became a way for the ruling family to be one with the people in a very positive and optimistic and upbeat way, 109 00:12:10,670 --> 00:12:17,390 because the Egyptians seem to winning all the time. So it was a successful version of the Egyptian nation, which was very normalised, 110 00:12:17,390 --> 00:12:26,310 in which the Mubarak family could tap into and hence became a very important part of the sort of soft power of the of the regime, I suppose. 111 00:12:26,310 --> 00:12:32,330 OK, so so the revolution began in 2011 and goes on through 2012. 112 00:12:32,330 --> 00:12:43,790 And one of the claims that one constantly heard was that football ultras had played a key role in fighting against security forces. 113 00:12:43,790 --> 00:12:49,550 And yet by 2012, the general public was starting to become quite wary of the violence that is going on on the street. 114 00:12:49,550 --> 00:13:01,250 And perhaps was was blaming this on the same young men that were earlier sort of held up as as the kind of the loyal foot soldiers of the revolution, 115 00:13:01,250 --> 00:13:06,470 I guess. What's your take on that dynamic? 116 00:13:06,470 --> 00:13:10,790 What was your experience of interacting with ultras and how did they see their role in the revolution? 117 00:13:10,790 --> 00:13:18,560 And was the sort of public discourse about them accurate or or revealing about something? 118 00:13:18,560 --> 00:13:21,660 I think it's it's a great question. 119 00:13:21,660 --> 00:13:29,810 I was spending like three chapters in the book trying to talk about the Ultras role in the revolution from many different angles. 120 00:13:29,810 --> 00:13:34,730 But I think this standard narrative about the ultras being very important, 121 00:13:34,730 --> 00:13:40,760 fighting back the police in Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mahmoud Street and this place, it is accurate. 122 00:13:40,760 --> 00:13:48,470 They played an important role and partly because they had an experience of fighting the police before 2011 because they had been the Ultras fans. 123 00:13:48,470 --> 00:13:56,910 Are this new type of football fans that evolved in Egypt from 2007 onwards and much younger type of fans with a different type 124 00:13:56,910 --> 00:14:08,000 of fandom that was very much in opposition to to the way Mubarak and the media was running their type of football at the time. 125 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:14,550 And because of that to the police, they were ostracised by the media and also very much securitise and persecuted by the police forces. 126 00:14:14,550 --> 00:14:18,380 So they had this experience of fighting the police before 2011, 127 00:14:18,380 --> 00:14:26,450 which they then took into the streets and became an important part of the revolutionary transformation in 2011. 128 00:14:26,450 --> 00:14:34,040 Now, what I'm trying to do in this book is also to say that the sort of the revolution of the ultras, what was was bigger than that. 129 00:14:34,040 --> 00:14:40,580 It was also which I just mentioned as a way of challenging the way the emotional 130 00:14:40,580 --> 00:14:48,500 political bubble that that football had had constituted during the Mubarak era. 131 00:14:48,500 --> 00:14:58,160 So if if Mubarak had used football in one way to to stake out a version of the nation that was very suitable for him and his and his regime, 132 00:14:58,160 --> 00:15:06,740 the ultras had a very different way of engaging emotionally with the game from 2007 onwards that was more internationally oriented and younger, 133 00:15:06,740 --> 00:15:15,920 more do it yourself, not so dependent on the media, more about like doing your own flags and chants and songs and dance at the stadium, 134 00:15:15,920 --> 00:15:22,530 very much stadium focussed instead of media focussed, very much focussed on social media rather than satellite television. 135 00:15:22,530 --> 00:15:31,700 It was a totally different football universe that was challenging the way in which football had been media ties 136 00:15:31,700 --> 00:15:39,320 and supported and picked up by the regime and by establishment actors up in the run up to the revolution. 137 00:15:39,320 --> 00:15:42,500 So the Egypt football revolution that I'm talking about, 138 00:15:42,500 --> 00:15:47,750 the title of the book is it's a bigger thing than just the Ultras being fighting the police in the streets, 139 00:15:47,750 --> 00:15:56,720 even though that was part of the thing as well. It was also this emotional channel challenge, a totally different style of being a football fan, 140 00:15:56,720 --> 00:16:01,850 but also staked out a different way of being an Egyptian national man. 141 00:16:01,850 --> 00:16:10,580 I suppose that then came to overtake Mubarak's football nation during the revolutionary year. 142 00:16:10,580 --> 00:16:14,550 I wanted to ask you about emotion. You know, the book. 143 00:16:14,550 --> 00:16:19,250 You know, it's brilliant at dissecting the politics of Egyptian football, 144 00:16:19,250 --> 00:16:28,010 but but the politics are refracted through masculinity and emotion, which are mentioned of the title of the book. 145 00:16:28,010 --> 00:16:34,370 Why emotion? I mean, what what what caused you to make that kind of conflict? 146 00:16:34,370 --> 00:16:40,340 Thing that helped to kind of distributed organised politics for several reasons. 147 00:16:40,340 --> 00:16:45,860 First of all, I think it's well, I think, 148 00:16:45,860 --> 00:16:49,580 as I just said about what was happening during the Mubarak era and the way in 149 00:16:49,580 --> 00:16:54,770 which football was why football became so powerful as it is this vehicle to 150 00:16:54,770 --> 00:16:59,150 stake out a version of the nation that was so useful and beneficial for the 151 00:16:59,150 --> 00:17:05,410 Mubarak regime was also because it is such an emotionally attractive thing. 152 00:17:05,410 --> 00:17:15,080 It also draws a lot of people to it. Right. So it is obvious that football becomes this powerful vehicle for mobilisation 153 00:17:15,080 --> 00:17:21,200 because it's such an emotional thing that that that draws people into this world. 154 00:17:21,200 --> 00:17:29,240 But I also think there is something and then the way in which and the way in which it delineates way of being an Egyptian citizen, 155 00:17:29,240 --> 00:17:38,030 an Egyptian man is through not only making people talk and behave in a certain way, but also feel in certain ways for the nation. 156 00:17:38,030 --> 00:17:44,600 I'm using I'm picking up a lot of stories where it affected states, you know, affect emotion. 157 00:17:44,600 --> 00:17:51,740 I'm belittling it, delineating a little bit about between the two concepts in the book, but not not so much necessarily. 158 00:17:51,740 --> 00:17:58,490 And I'm saying both that the football is very powerful and in the Egyptian case, especially, 159 00:17:58,490 --> 00:18:06,650 to create this sort of affective state of defining how people should feel for feel for football and also for the nation. 160 00:18:06,650 --> 00:18:12,500 But that is also always a volatile type of politics, because you cannot never really control emotions. 161 00:18:12,500 --> 00:18:20,900 You cannot really. And they are very powerful, but also always fragile in a way. 162 00:18:20,900 --> 00:18:29,340 Other presumably the normative construct of masculinity demands the suppression of emotion. 163 00:18:29,340 --> 00:18:37,430 Drew, Drew, that's that's maybe the stereotype about that, but I mean, this is in case of people is definitely not the case. 164 00:18:37,430 --> 00:18:40,200 You are supposed to feel very strongly for the team. 165 00:18:40,200 --> 00:18:46,470 And the ultras are all about creating a strong emotional performances, strong emotional communities at the stadium. 166 00:18:46,470 --> 00:18:47,700 That's that's what it's all about. 167 00:18:47,700 --> 00:18:54,390 That's why it's so otherwise it would never have drawn in hundreds of thousands of young kids in Egypt to do this thing. 168 00:18:54,390 --> 00:18:58,200 If if it wasn't fun. You know, this is this is this is the main thing. 169 00:18:58,200 --> 00:19:06,960 All the people that interlocutor's, my ultras friends, they always talk about how that this is the best thing that they do, 170 00:19:06,960 --> 00:19:10,340 the thing that, like, they love themselves to do just down the street. 171 00:19:10,340 --> 00:19:15,270 That actually leads to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is, I mean, you know, in a way to, you know, 172 00:19:15,270 --> 00:19:21,540 to force football into the more the politics kind of kind of kills it in a way when, 173 00:19:21,540 --> 00:19:25,290 you know, it's a game that people love is a game that people enjoy. 174 00:19:25,290 --> 00:19:33,630 And this perhaps kind of is a way to kind of gesture towards where it book leads in the end, 175 00:19:33,630 --> 00:19:37,440 because I know that you're aware of this from from having read your dissertation. 176 00:19:37,440 --> 00:19:45,060 And so, you know, the joy of the game. Did that eventually transcend the politics? 177 00:19:45,060 --> 00:19:52,290 Did it did it sort of merge with the politics? You know, do not go to people. 178 00:19:52,290 --> 00:19:58,580 Do people still love playing football? And and where did the politics of the revolutionary period? 179 00:19:58,580 --> 00:20:06,800 Yeah, probably the final part of the title, right, so Egypt's football revolution in motion, masculinity and uneasy politics. 180 00:20:06,800 --> 00:20:14,600 Right. So one thing that is popping up in several chapters in the book in which wasn't really that highlighted in this dissertation, 181 00:20:14,600 --> 00:20:22,650 but the much more emphasis now in the book verse in the book is this way in which. 182 00:20:22,650 --> 00:20:28,020 Well, as far as this this passage I read initially himself, 183 00:20:28,020 --> 00:20:35,580 and this is part of a chapter when I talk a lot about how fans who used to be extremely invested in football, extremely passionate about the game, 184 00:20:35,580 --> 00:20:40,200 lost their interest and their passions and their feelings for football, 185 00:20:40,200 --> 00:20:49,280 especially after this very tragic stadium massacre, a 72 hour response in Quartzite on the 1st of February 2012. 186 00:20:49,280 --> 00:20:55,340 And this is a process that had been going on for a while already before that, but after that it was became widespread. 187 00:20:55,340 --> 00:21:00,170 A lot of people felt that we cannot really care about the sport anymore. 188 00:21:00,170 --> 00:21:06,980 Partly because so many people have died, but the way it formulated it and this is the important thing, is the cost of the game has been politicised. 189 00:21:06,980 --> 00:21:11,780 It's been entangled with politics, CSA. 190 00:21:11,780 --> 00:21:20,050 So here you have the problem that when it became part, when it became articulated that football had been politicised. 191 00:21:20,050 --> 00:21:30,040 And this started to happen slightly before 2011, but then became accentuated a much more widespread in 2011 and 2012, 192 00:21:30,040 --> 00:21:38,890 it became more and more difficult for people to feel and care about the game because there was some sort of tension between, 193 00:21:38,890 --> 00:21:49,150 on the one hand, football being this this space of joy and freedom and pleasure and politics with all these uneasy connotations of uncertainty, 194 00:21:49,150 --> 00:21:57,310 of violence, of all seriousness, I suppose, which made it difficult for a lot of people to feel for the game. 195 00:21:57,310 --> 00:22:02,740 And I'm trying to delineate that through the graphic study of of of discussions, debate, 196 00:22:02,740 --> 00:22:08,890 but also experiences of CSR politics in Egypt and how people talk about it and also feel 197 00:22:08,890 --> 00:22:14,470 politics in different ways and how that it's always sort of connoting these feelings of unease 198 00:22:14,470 --> 00:22:22,150 and anxieties and in many different ways and how that has led over time to football becoming 199 00:22:22,150 --> 00:22:28,180 more and more difficult to feel for and cared for in the way people did before 2011. 200 00:22:28,180 --> 00:22:33,460 And as I say in the postscript, which deals with the last two years, 21, 18 and 24, 201 00:22:33,460 --> 00:22:40,590 2018 and 2019, when Egypt reached the World Cup in 2018 and posted African Cup of Nations 2019, 202 00:22:40,590 --> 00:22:48,700 this side, this ambivalence is still there, even though Mohammed Soloff, the new big football superstar, is the big, best player ever. 203 00:22:48,700 --> 00:22:57,650 Egypt has reached a World Cup, which it didn't do during the Mubarak era, and especially except for 1990. 204 00:22:57,650 --> 00:23:01,460 There was still not at all the same type of hype around the game. 205 00:23:01,460 --> 00:23:08,210 And part of that was because a lot of fans felt that they had realised after revolution they 206 00:23:08,210 --> 00:23:13,110 had been sort of fooled by this big football hype and it didn't want that to be recreated. 207 00:23:13,110 --> 00:23:20,180 There was always an inside is like, do we really want to wholeheartedly support this football team again? 208 00:23:20,180 --> 00:23:30,590 There's a risk of getting back to the same politicisation that they had sort of managed to get away from doing during the Revolutionary War. 209 00:23:30,590 --> 00:23:39,350 And so there is this anxiety that I'm trying to to delineate in the book and in several chapters to more linked questions. 210 00:23:39,350 --> 00:23:49,010 First of all, are you continuing to do research on football specifically or moving into new directions? 211 00:23:49,010 --> 00:23:53,120 And secondly, if one were I mean, your book was brilliant. 212 00:23:53,120 --> 00:23:58,430 I mean, it's a brilliant book based on a brilliant dissertation, which I loved reading. 213 00:23:58,430 --> 00:24:05,520 But is it the last word in football if one were to continue doing well, if somebody else were to do research on football? 214 00:24:05,520 --> 00:24:11,530 What would you want them to tell them to look at? This is this is a good question. 215 00:24:11,530 --> 00:24:14,950 I'm sort of still doing it, but in a slightly different way. 216 00:24:14,950 --> 00:24:21,880 I'm looking more at youth football and the way in which sort of everyday football sort of back 217 00:24:21,880 --> 00:24:25,240 to this everyday football thing that I was sort of starting out with before the revolution 218 00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:30,490 struck and looking at the emergence of this small new football pitches all over Cairo and sort 219 00:24:30,490 --> 00:24:37,930 of but morphed from a sort of investor perspective rather than actually with the game itself. 220 00:24:37,930 --> 00:24:45,990 And I think. And, you know, it's a good question and. 221 00:24:45,990 --> 00:24:47,670 There are several obvious options, 222 00:24:47,670 --> 00:24:55,410 there's this and I'm also looking at it in the paper I'm writing at the moment about the sort of religious connotations around the game, 223 00:24:55,410 --> 00:24:59,070 the sort of this blatant fact that a lot of people have been mentioning, 224 00:24:59,070 --> 00:25:07,620 but never really understood that there are absolutely very few Christian Egyptians who who have been representing, 225 00:25:07,620 --> 00:25:15,750 like there's been one Egyptian player ever in the national team over hundreds more than one hundred years. 226 00:25:15,750 --> 00:25:22,980 So this is something there is something there with with them and the way in which football is quoted us as Muslim, 227 00:25:22,980 --> 00:25:31,860 but also about obviously some sort of discrimination at many multiple levels that I'm assuming in real life. 228 00:25:31,860 --> 00:25:38,610 Christians, Christian kids play football as much as Muslim. Absolutely to do, but for some reason to never really reach the top. 229 00:25:38,610 --> 00:25:42,970 And that's that's something that could be, I don't know, looked at somehow if it's possible. 230 00:25:42,970 --> 00:25:55,860 I'm not really sure. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what like in terms of fan culture, the Ultras are not really there anymore. 231 00:25:55,860 --> 00:26:00,330 Ultras Alawi, the biggest focus group, was dissolved in twenty eighteen. 232 00:26:00,330 --> 00:26:03,360 So they they just don't exist. 233 00:26:03,360 --> 00:26:12,440 Ultras white knights were just ultra supporting ZMOLEK, the second biggest club in Cairo, just still around, but they're quite inactive. 234 00:26:12,440 --> 00:26:16,440 So that's sort of the thing that I've been writing about, about the politicisation of the game. 235 00:26:16,440 --> 00:26:23,920 And that seems to be sort of disappearing and a lot of that. 236 00:26:23,920 --> 00:26:33,340 Although, of course, you know, at the same time, this hesitancy for football to come back, it's likely it will waned with time, it will disappear. 237 00:26:33,340 --> 00:26:41,950 I'm sure football will come back and be enormously popular. It is enormously popular in Egypt today as it is everywhere. 238 00:26:41,950 --> 00:26:47,950 You know, anything else you want to say? Um. 239 00:26:47,950 --> 00:26:57,730 Not maybe also some mention of this unease, this inside is about politics is something that pops up also into Ultra's chapters all the time, 240 00:26:57,730 --> 00:27:10,780 where I'm running an argument about or I'm showing through my material about the Ultra's, we're constantly accused by the media for being political. 241 00:27:10,780 --> 00:27:18,370 So that was one of the main ways in which they were demonised by and by the media and by establishment 242 00:27:18,370 --> 00:27:23,830 actors that they were trying to when they were trying to revolutionary revolutionaries, 243 00:27:23,830 --> 00:27:34,090 Egyptian political data, always positive political meaning that they were fighting for their own specific demands, their own specific, 244 00:27:34,090 --> 00:27:42,520 not for the nation as a whole, right at the same time to just constantly try to say we are not political either by saying, 245 00:27:42,520 --> 00:27:49,470 OK, we are only football fans, we're not into politics, or by saying that we are pure nationalist and everyone else we are fighting for, 246 00:27:49,470 --> 00:27:52,000 for the cause, for the good of the whole people. 247 00:27:52,000 --> 00:28:01,030 But the entire Egyptian people for a moment, when Donald Trump managed to to just stay very strong and have a very strong say in Egyptian politics, 248 00:28:01,030 --> 00:28:02,830 in the revolutionary transition, 249 00:28:02,830 --> 00:28:10,750 they managed to pull off this sort of balancing act between being being a very forceful force and doing a lot of things. 250 00:28:10,750 --> 00:28:15,520 They're running campaigns for change and justice and everything without looking political. 251 00:28:15,520 --> 00:28:21,910 But in the end, they lost the ability for a number of reasons that I outlined some of them. 252 00:28:21,910 --> 00:28:29,620 It was remarkable because prior prior to the revolution, I mean, ultras would be the sort of people that many middle class people would fear. 253 00:28:29,620 --> 00:28:34,300 And, you know, there was a movie there was in the theatre just before the revolution came out called Six, seven, eight, 254 00:28:34,300 --> 00:28:42,370 which is about sexual harassment, in which one of the characters, one of the female characters, is raped in the aftermath of a football match by. 255 00:28:42,370 --> 00:28:43,120 I mentioned that. 256 00:28:43,120 --> 00:28:50,150 I mentioned that in one chapter, ultras, ultras, like people who kind of look a little bit like kind of like minded, serious fans like office. 257 00:28:50,150 --> 00:28:50,710 So. 258 00:28:50,710 --> 00:28:58,870 So it was indeed a, you know, a very interesting balancing act that they were able to achieve during the revolution, that there was for a year there. 259 00:28:58,870 --> 00:29:04,840 There was this exceptional moment when they somehow tried to to be both very active and very forward 260 00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:11,500 looking and and like doing all these things and affecting all this change without looking political. 261 00:29:11,500 --> 00:29:17,860 But then they somehow lost that ability and then they sort of also became very marginalised from the revolutionary struggle. 262 00:29:17,860 --> 00:29:23,110 And I'm sort of make an argument and a conclusion that this might be a way of this might be something 263 00:29:23,110 --> 00:29:26,680 that we might want to considering for the for the revolutionary movement as a whole in Egypt, 264 00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:31,690 that there was always this this assumption that the revolution should be nationalist for the whole 265 00:29:31,690 --> 00:29:38,830 people and not really political in that sense of being for a faction of a certain class or something, 266 00:29:38,830 --> 00:29:46,560 in that it might not be very easy to to to carry out a revolutionary change if you want to stay non-political at the same time. 267 00:29:46,560 --> 00:29:51,850 And I know that you and other researchers are doing work on the end of the post 268 00:29:51,850 --> 00:30:00,960 revolution of how people deal with the letdown from the revolution that was defeated. 269 00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:04,900 And, you know, for the ultras, I guess nothing of the revolution was their shining moment. 270 00:30:04,900 --> 00:30:13,720 And, you know, that that must have been particularly hard. Very much so, and a lot of the leaders are either in prison or abroad, 271 00:30:13,720 --> 00:30:19,150 a lot of people are not living in Egypt anymore or moving on to some other type of career. 272 00:30:19,150 --> 00:30:24,700 People are getting growing older. So, you know, most of these people were in their early 20s at the time. 273 00:30:24,700 --> 00:30:33,640 Now during their early 30s. And you know very well, I think on that rather sad note, we're going to have to end. 274 00:30:33,640 --> 00:30:36,850 Yeah, it's been wonderful talking to you. I look at your station. 275 00:30:36,850 --> 00:30:46,870 I will enjoy reading the book, which I suspect is quite similar to the dissertation, which was actually one of the best ones I've read. 276 00:30:46,870 --> 00:30:56,110 I've been speaking with author Carl Raml about his book, Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics. 277 00:30:56,110 --> 00:31:08,669 And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.